In keeping with my policy of providing the “writing-of” afterword to each republished story here, what follows is my latest afterword, “Writing The Little Things.” I hope you enjoy it, and of course if it makes you want to spend 99c to buy the story, so much the better.

Writing "The Little Things"Many years ago I first read about the annual red crab migration on Christmas Island. It was in National Geographic, accompanied by some amazing photos of roads and streets and the stairs of public buildings entirely covered in masses of fortunately vegetarian crabs, while the islanders went about their daily business, albeit carefully.

Christmas Island is a little speck in the Indian Ocean northwest of Australia, just 135 square kilometers in area. For comparison, Seattle—where I live—is a slightly larger speck with an area barely more than 150 square km.

Fifty million or so Christmas Island red crabs, Gecarcoidea natalis, live on Christmas Island under the cover of the forest canopy. For ten months of any year, they are seldom seen unless one is looking for them. But every year from October through November (and sometimes into December), every able-bodied red crab on the island leaves its forest home and heads for the sea to mate.

Over half of the island is an Australian national park, the crabs are protected by law, and many roads are closed to vehicular traffic during the migration. That said, an estimated two million crabs a year are squashed by automobiles, and you may be sure many are eagerly snapped up by other types of predators, too. Tens of millions eventually reach their mating coves at the ocean’s edge, where each female discharges about 100,000 eggs into the sea. The survivors will later form a millions-strong reverse migration back into the forest.

So that’s the part about the crabs. Look ’em up. There are videos. It’s amazing.

This is the part about the fairies.

In 1990, Walt Disney re-released its 1940 animated film Fantasia to 500 theaters across the U.S. I remember sitting in the darkened cinema watching a sequence early in the film set to Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.” In this part of the film, tiny, slender winged creatures dance through the air, sprinkle flowers with dew, and generally flit about looking charming. It really is quite a lovely bit of Disney animation. My favorite part is where the fairies bedew a spider’s web and make it sparkle like some fine lady’s gems.

I have watched this film since, and haven’t yet been able to pinpoint where what I saw might have reminded me of the red crab migration, and made me think “Yeah, but they wouldn’t look so cute if there were about fifty million of them.”

My mind began to do that thing writers’ minds do, and by the time I arrived home, I had begun to imagine a fairy migration to rival anything Christmas Island had ever seen. Only instead of an expected annual event, this one would be the entirely unexpected revival of an endangered species, and the affected people would be entirely unprepared for the complete and utter invasion of another life form into their normally uneventful lives.

And so grew the sleepy village of Morgan’s Glen, where fairies exist in picture-books, and in the fond memories of old people like Miranda Morgan, who actually saw one when she was six or seven. And into that first day of seeing fairies in the world again came Martin Price, Miss Morgan’s gentle gardener and driver, who has never done anything more violent than to set ladybugs out to eat aphids. Cook and Willamena settled into the basement kitchen to round out Miss Morgan’s minimal staff, and Mr. Pennyford and Joey Stanleigh appeared magically when needed to provide a slightly different point of view on the desirability of having fairies around.

Writing a story—even when no fairies are involved—is always a sort of magical act. Since the time I wrote “The Little Things,” I have written to order for book and game franchises, and for theme anthologies. That sort of writing can easily seem cut and dried as you begin it, but no matter how a story is called into being, some sort of creative magic arrives at some point and takes over the process. If it did not, you’d end up with a collection of sentences and paragraphs without any real life in them, and no-one—no matter how devoted to the franchise—would care to read it.

This story felt magical to me from the opening paragraph through to the last words on the last page. I made some minor revisions for Kris Rusch after sending it to her at Fantasy & Science Fiction, adding the scene where Martin and Miss Morgan discuss her reluctance to reveal the “Morgan family secret” to help the village dig out from under the fairies, and deleting a scene where Miss Morgan appears at a second town council meeting. Kris thought the scene seemed tacked on and unnecessary, and indeed it did. Good editors are worth their weight in anything you’ve got, and she’s among the best.

So there you have the story, and the story behind the story. Writing “The Little Things” was one of the most enjoyable experiences I ever had writing a piece of short fiction. I think Martin and the fairies must have done the work, and I had all the fun.

Today I put up a corrected version of my short story “Hole in the Wall,” which was originally published in Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine in May 1991, edited by Gardner Dozois.

As I've been republishing these works of short fiction that appeared in science fiction magazines some years back, I've been writing afterwords that tell something of how I came to write the story. When I was ready to republish this one, I realized the afterword was far too short and contained far too little. So I started over and told more of the story behind the story.

In keeping with my recent habit of providing the afterword to each new publication here, in addition to inside the very-reasonably-priced book itself, what follows this paragraph is the afterword to “Hole in the Wall,” which you can read even if you’re not going to shell out 99c, though of course I would never try to stop you from doing that too.

Writing Hole in the WallWhen I first got the idea for “Hole in the Wall,” I didn’t know what I was going to do with it. I knew the story took place in a diner, and in the diner was a wall with a portal that went somewhere. So I had a setting, but not yet a story. Later I decided the man who ran the diner was called Tomacheski, who was a recent immigrant. Now I had a setting with a character. And there it languished. In those days, or so it seemed to me at the time, some of my ideas became fully-realized stories, and others did not; I had no clue as to why. I was still a bit new to this writing lark, and although I'd made a couple of fiction sales, the whole process seemed more like luck to me than craft.

Eventually, luck took me far enough that I could absorb the craft I needed. I met Algis Budrys, who was then the editorial director for the Writers of the Future contest. On the night we met, at a party attended by quite a few starry-eyed wannabe science fiction and fantasy writers, he shared with us the seven-point plot skeleton that he claimed was the inner structure of every story. You would not find it in vignettes or stream-of-consciousness pieces, he said, but whether the author knew it was there or not, it served as the bones of every story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and knowing how to apply it was an important key to stories that worked.

I didn't yet know whether that was true, and I didn’t yet know how basic the structure of narrative is to human consciousness, but I took it on faith. I consciously applied the model to the next story I wrote, and the next, and the next. I sent these stories off to Writers of the Future, in three successive quarters. I received honorable mentions for the first two, which was wonderful encouragement, especially as some of the most amazing writers of the time were judging: Anne McCaffrey, Roger Zelazny, Larry Niven, and Gene Wolfe were among the judges that year. I felt there was a distinct possibility I might be doing something right.

I've since found the seven plot structure elements Algis revealed to me that night in every story I've ever examined, no matter how commercial or how high-flown and literary, though many writers will still tell you the structure doesn't exist, and others confuse plot with formula. Algis used to say "Formula is putting Coke™ in a Coke bottle for Coke drinkers. Plot is the structure of the events in your story. Storyline is what happens to your character as a result of those events." Years later, a writer who's won every award I ever lost and a few more rapped my knuckles thoroughly when I wrote an article about seven-point plot structure for a writers' magazine, and warned anyone reading his commentary that I was peddling claptrap. You can see that opinions differ sharply on this subject.

So back to the evening in December 1985, when I got a phone call at the bookstore I managed in Redding, California. It was from the WotF contest director, who informed me I had won first prize for the fourth quarter of that year for my story "The Old Organ Trail." We talked for a few minutes while my feet tried in vain to find the floor; he seemed as pleased to be giving the news as I was to be receiving it. After he'd hung up I remember thinking “I must have mis-heard him. He probably said third place.” Fortunately, that was just my insecurity trying to keep me from getting my hopes up. It was first place, and I got a really nice check for the win, and another when Algis bought the story for the annual anthology at an unheard-of word rate for an unknown writer.

A few months later, I was invited to a week-long workshop in Taos, New Mexico. This was the first Writers of the Future workshop—a test case to see if the idea would work. The workshop was held in May, 1986. There, four of the greats of science fiction—Frederik Pohl, Gene Wolfe, Jack Williamson, and Algis Budrys himself—did their best to teach eleven new writers (including Dean Wesley Smith and Kristine Kathryn Rusch, whose blogs you should be reading if you don’t already) how to turn an idea into a story, and how to make the story shine once you’ve written it. “First you write it, then you make it good!” was a piece of memorable advice from Fred Pohl that should probably be tattooed on every new writer.

As the workshop progressed, and I learned more about the structure of stories, I began to think of the ones I’d begun, then abandoned in old notebooks because I had no idea how to complete them. I had loosely plotted two of them by the time I got home and went looking for those notebooks. "Hole in the Wall" was one of the stories I dug up that year, and eventually finished.

Early on in outlining the story (yes, I do outline—no, I don’t always stick to the outline), I was having difficulty bringing the narrative alive. I realized I needed to make a change in the my choice of viewpoint characters. Ladislaw Tomacheski was the hero of my story, but the more I thought about it, the more I felt I needed to tell it from Morton Grimes’ viewpoint.

As Tomacheski’s story, it would tell of the triumph of the little guy over a corrupt system which Grimes would personify; potentially interesting and fun, but I felt like I was missing something.

Morton Grimes’ story is about a man who's so tied up in his own narrow ideology that he can't recognize good people when he meets them, and never seems to be on the side of the angels in any situation. In the end, he loses his last and best chance to change. As Grimes’ story, “Hole in the Wall” could relate the same basic events with the same humor, but Grimes’ overpowering sense of justification and lack of human understanding would be clearer, and the underlying tragedy would make itself felt. The story felt stronger and more meaningful to me this way. Having made that decision, the writing became much easier; the story had found its voice.

Shortly before I sent this story to Gardner Dozois at Asimov’s, I sent him a novelette-length time travel story. He said he thought it was a good story, but was going to turn it down. In general, he said, time travel stories didn’t make a lot of sense to him.

I put that one aside, and sent him the very next thing down on my stack, which was…yep…another time travel story. I didn’t realize this until after I’d mailed it, and so resigned myself to getting it back shortly. Fortunately, Gardner liked this one enough to write a check. “Hole in the Wall” appeared in Asimov’s in May 1991, and again in Timegates, (Ace Science Fiction, edited by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann), in 1997. Thanks Gardner, and thanks Jack, and thanks to all you readers out there.

This past weekend I put my first two backlist short stories— The Bard Effect and Hole in the Wall—up on the Amazon Kindle store. I've put descriptions of each story on the Home page. Both were originally published in major science fiction magazines some years back, and I'm happy to be able to present them to a new audience.

I had set a project deadline of 21 October, but due to the intricacies of ebook formatting and conversion, about which more below, I frequently despaired of making it. As it happens, the first book was for sale on that date, the second didn't pop up until sometime after midnight. I wasn't awake to see it.

Congratulations! It's a Book!In the days when my publishing fate was tied in with traditional publishing, I have gazed lovingly at cover flats from my publisher, and held those first precious advance copies of my novels, savoring the the solidity—the sheer physicality—of the finished product. I won't lie: it was pretty glorious. But it was not, I think, more glorious than seeing a book I'd created from words to formatting to cover to sales copy populate its own Amazon page. I'd gone from contemplating becoming an independent publisher about seven months before, to seeing my first two projects available for sale.

Excuse Me, I Really Have to Scream NowSomewhere between those two points there were months of re-keying published stories from old magazine copies, converting to hand-built XHTML, and figuring out what Kindle's Mobi format really wanted from me, and how I could induce it to create a good-looking ebook. Having some experience with HTML and CSS helped considerably, but I could have picked up what little I needed fairly quickly, if I had not.

I first found out that Using KindleGen, I could instantly convert any well-formed HTML document to a reasonable-looking ebook , but reasonable-looking was not my goal. I wanted to get in and tinker under the hood a bit without being overwhelmed by a brick wall of unexplained technology. My answer was arrived at with some help from Guido Henkel, who has written a series of wonderful tips for using CSS in Mobi documents using Calibre, and from R. K. MacPherson, who allowed me to benefit from the lessons he had learned by going there first and being generous with his time and help.

Even given all that, which provided an enormous head start, I probably built each book at least a couple of dozen times, finding different errors, or different things I wanted to try, each time I produced a converted file. How much space looks good between a heading and the following text? What's the best way to produce an unindented paragraph at the beginning of a chapter or scene? What's the best graphics format for a graphic title page? (Answer: low-compression .jpgs hold up best). And on and on.

A Contribution from the Operatic SopranoAnd finally, each book looked like I wanted it to look, was as free of errors and ugly spots as I could make it short of sainthood, and was ready to be presented to readers. So if you were going to shell out a buck for a book today, consider one of these, and let me know what you think of it. I'll be over in the corner figuring out how to format for Nook and Kobo.